In general, electronic musical instruments are known which have a plurality of operators, wherein musical tones are assigned, or mapped, in advance to each of these plurality of operators by such means as the assignment of waveform data that represents the musical tones, and wherein the musical tones that have been assigned to the appropriate operators are read out and reproduced in accordance with the operation of each of the operators. Previously, for this type of electronic musical instruments, it has been possible to assign or cancel the assignment of any musical tone desired to any operator at will. Unfortunately, in some past electronic musical instruments, it was not possible to differentiate and display the operators to which musical tones had been mapped and the operators to which musical tones had not been mapped. Since it is not possible to verify whether a musical tone has been mapped to an operator without undertaking the operation of the operator, there have been the problems that operators to which musical tones are not mapped are uselessly operated during the performance and the user becomes confused regarding which of the operators should be operated.
In particular, the problems described above have been strikingly apparent when changes are made to the state of the mapping of the musical tones to the operators such as canceling the mapping of musical tones to operators which, up to that point, have had musical tones mapped or carrying out the mapping of new musical tones to operators that, up to that point, have not had musical tones mapped.
Despite some of the problems, for the convenience of the performance operation, there are instances in which it is desirable to cancel the assignments of the musical tones that have been made to certain operators, referred to as "the first operators," and to assign these canceled musical tones to other operators, referred to as "the second operators". Nevertheless, for electronic musical instruments in which it is possible to assign any musical tone desired to any operator at will, changing the assignment of the musical tones from a first operator to a second operator has not been considered.
As it is possible in some electronic musical instruments to assign any musical tone desired to any operator at will, it is not impossible by some device of operation on the part of the user to assign the musical tones that have been assigned to the first operators to the second operators instead. For instance, a user can access the setting screen for the assignment of musical tones to the first operators, investigate which musical tones are assigned to which of the first operators and cancel those assignments. Next, the user can access the setting screen for the assignment of musical tones to the second operators and can assign the canceled musical tones to the second operators.
Although this procedure is possible, it is extremely troublesome and, in addition, it is subject to mistakes in the assignments of musical tones to operators, thereby increasing the likelihood of the occurrence of an erroneous operation. Further, due to the potentially random cancellation of musical tone assignments to the operators, the musical tones are not assigned to the plurality of operators in a series and thus, the assignment of the musical tones to the plurality of operators becomes scattered and is not necessarily sequential.
With the operators that do not have musical tones assigned, a problem arises in that, during a performance, a performer might mistakenly operate an operator that does not have a musical tone assigned. As no musical tone is assigned, no musical tone is reproduced and the performance is hampered.
If a performer attempts to carry out a performance so that operation mistakes such as that described above do not occur, the performer is placed under excessive strain which can lead to a lack of concentration during the performance.
In addition, it is only possible to assign one musical tone to each operator, because no more musical tones than the number of operators can be performed. In an attempt to increase the number of musical tones which can be played, patterns of musical tones have been established which can be assigned to each of the operators in a plurality of varieties. In this manner, it is possible to perform a greater number of musical tones than the number of operators by being able to select any of the patterns as desired.
However, in those cases where, for example, there are 16 operators, there is the problem that, when musical tones may have been assigned to only five of the operators in a certain pattern and musical tones may have been assigned to only seven of the operators in another pattern, if the patterns are not changed during the performance, all of these 12 (7+5) musical tones cannot be performed.
In addition, in those cases where it is desired to assign new musical tones to operators to which musical tones have not yet been assigned, when the operators to which musical tones have not yet been assigned are randomly arranged or scattered throughout the operators, there is the problem that it is difficult to carry out the assignment of the musical tones.
Embodiments of the present invention take into consideration the various problems presented by the technology of the past, such as those cited above. At least one objective of preferred embodiments of the instant invention is to present an electronic musical instrument which is configured to easily carry out the reassignment of musical tones from a first operator to a second operator.
Another objective of further embodiments of the present invention is to display whether a musical tone has been mapped to a particular operator.
Still a further objective of embodiments of the present invention is to present an electronic musical instrument with which, in those cases where there are operators to which no musical tones at all have been assigned, by a means of automatically assigning musical tones that have been assigned to other operators to the operators to which musical tones have not been assigned, the operators to which musical tones have been assigned are arranged in a relatively sequential, or concentrated, manner and it becomes easier to carry out a performance.